Boston 2005

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You don't have to be interested in Cuba to find the idea of visiting Fidel Castro interesting. In fact, if Fidel Castro lived in somewhere less exciting than Slough on the day of a train strike, the thought of interviewing the Santa Claus of international socialism would nevertheless set any hack's pulse racing faster than a pulsar-towed Shergar. Anyhow, Thomas Keown lives in one of the world's most interesting cities - one I had longed to visit for years. But he is such an ambulating compendium of greatest hits packages covering every genre of human existence that he would make a visit to Milton Keynes seem like a moonshot. Over the hundred hours or so in the western hemisphere I thought and laughed harder than I had for yonks.

Rockport

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Rockport could be the setting for any movie that had to feature a community representing an idealised idyll. Standing beside us (in fact, taking this photo) was a former Army man who finished decades of service abroad and decided to come back to the only American town he knew. His wife told him, "We live at the end of the world!" Hmm. It might be the beginning.

On Temple Street

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Thomas does one of the most useful jobs of anyone I know - it involves bringing Irish folks to a land of plenty beyond the sea. Think Moses except with a president called Bush instead of burning horticulture.

Bladerunner in Boston

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I was so excited when I saw a giant barrel which seemed to be connected to the fires in the Earth's core. It was certainly funnelling amazing amounts of steam into the icy street - Ridley Scott would have loved it

Clicking fingers

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It was a brief challenge to find someone who wasn't wearing gloves to take this picture

A nutty habit

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I know it's very hard to take a good picture of a squirrel, but when one's standing in front of you like this, what are you supposed to do?



You don't have to live in America to have a giant animated syncrenistic crib scene next to your home, but it helps. On the right is Mr Homberger - if I tried to detail all the reasons why he is a fascinating dude I would have to write so much it might crash the internet.

Gehry at the MIT

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Any university that asks Frank Gehry to design a new campus building is doing something right

Harvard Squared

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A Californian in a deli was made momentarily ill by something dodgy, but before that she said hello to two Irishmen. One of them felt very funny himself while visiting the Old State House. Anyhow, they all bumped into each other the next day while strolling through a snow-speckled Harvard. It turns out they were all born-again Christians.



John Harvard gets the credit for putting this university together, but apparently this statue of him features the wrong man, wrong name and wrong date. Maybe they were going for irony, or were busy being postmodern long before the French?

The Truthteller on the 62nd floor

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We'd just been to the most carnivorous restaurant I'd ever visited (it was in a basement and there was no need for knives or forks) when we decided to get an elevator to the top of the 2nd tallest skycraper city in Boston. The view was quite awesome, but not nearly as staggering as the honesty of the self-styled Indo-American named Rhee2 who brought us at least an hour of joy there for each glass she knocked over. Thing was, she was being honest about our secrets - she has not so much a knack for intuition as a very Old Testament gift of prophecy.

Irish have been coming here for years

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The Improper Bostonian may be on the table, but the greatest British sitcoms of the 20th century are in the corner.

The Dream

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Before breakfast in the JFK museum - a sight more inspiring than all the memorabilia... Alone, with Boston on the far side of the bay, it feels holy underneath that flag

Christmas 05

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At the place where the river Tyne meets the sea, Brother Ru and I had the good fortune to be walking at dusk on Christmas Eve with two of our dearest friends


In the background are some great men from Listowel who wrote some of the best-loved Irish literature. In the foreground are four great women.

Sion's world

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My colleague and comrade on the business desk, Sion Barry, has just started a blog which has the potential to become a cult favourite.

Why We Need A Conversant Communion with Catholicism in Ireland

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The relationship between Catholicism and Evangelicalism is a funny one.

Don't get me wrong. I think there's plenty of reforming still to be done in the Catholic church, and it has got itself into a dreadful tangle by coming up with the notion of infallibility in the mid-19th century (which in church time was just 20mins ago).

But there are a few points I, as an evangelical, have found worth bearing in mind. Rituals, when viewed from the outside and through a lens of suspicion rarely look good. And if you look at something as sprawling, diverse and complex as Catholicism for examples of heresy, you'll come up with something in about five minutes.

Also, make sure your examples of "what a Catholic thinks" are based on conversations with someone who truly knows what their tradition teaches, and not an occasional churchgoer who has no obvious passion for their belief. Quite a lot of our ideas about what goes on in the church of Rome are based on the stories of people who have left it; the US and UK got the wrong idea about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after uncritically listening to exiles like Ahmed Chalabi.

Yes, Catholicism contains distortions. But so does Protestantism. This is "plank in the eye" territory. Many Mission Praise hymns have haywire theology. An outsider would look at a lively worship service and say, "These people believe God can hear them if they raise their hands in the air - how very, very strange!"

All denominations need to be in a constant state of reformation. We're so easily influenced by our own superstitions; all religions have manifestations of the human quest for magic and ritual and a priestly class. We need to ask, where is the dross and the falsehood in Reformed faith? Baptising babies is an example of a practice which is dubious to say the least.

But when looking at our spiritual neighbours, we should also ask, "What does God make of this?" and "How is this a response to his revelation?" Catholics do believe that we can only be saved through the justifying death of Christ. They have some very different views about how we go about receiving that grace, but they have kept alive and preached the amazing truth that Christ came and died for our sins.

I groaned a little when I first learned of Ratzinger's growing momentum in the run-up to the Papal election, but then I thought, "Wait a second. He is an uncompromising exponent that the reality of Jesus and the revelation of truth is the most important thing in the universe." And when considering issues like abortion, cloning, divorce etc, do we really want another equivocating leader like the type found in so many mainstream churches?

Even the man who did the most to take the fun out of fundamentalism, Ian Paisley, has a lot more in common with the new Pope than the type of liberal Anglican, Methodist or Presbyterian who, when pressed, doesn't really believe in the authenticity of the Bible or the uniqueness of Christ.

Yet the most challenging thing to think about Catholics, the Orthodox or any strand of Christendom which seems alien and peculiar is this: When they pray to God in Christ, where do those prayers go? I can't believe they just vanish into the ether. If they call on a loving God, I'm certain that he will turn to them and hear them.

It sometimes troubles and puzzles me there so little direct outreach to Catholics by Northern Irish Protestants. If so many of us are convinced there is a real danger of hellfire, why do we do so spectacularly little about it? I'd love Catholics to know more about the assurance of salvation that Christ has brought. I wish they had different concepts about the Communion and the incense and stuff can be unsettling...

But maybe renewal will come within Catholicism as more and more people throw themselves into bible study. God is a God who is a joyful giver. If increasing numbers of Catholics are seeking him directly, and breaking through the veil, then I'm sure he will turn his face towards them and love them. It goes without saying - doesn't it? - we should do the same.
Much of mainstream Protestantism has been swept far away from the fundamentals of the faith. The Catholic Church is the only global denomination that is unflinching on the deep core doctrines. It is a tragedy that there is so much superstition in so many of its congregations, and that at times in history it has persecuted the preachers of the gospel but, incredibly, God has been faithful to the millions within it who have sought him.

Though the vessel has been periodically boarded by pirates, locked in the cargo hold is the core belief that God became man, born of a virgin, who died and rose again.
Compare this with the wholescale abandonment of the belief that Jesus was fully God and man and that the scriptures are the word of God that has characterised Protestantism since the 19th century.

Ratzinger, the present Pope, has spent his life fighting those in his own church who have sought to dilute these teachings. And also, the Catholic church has taken the lead the Protestant churches should have taken on abortion - perhaps the greatest moral cause of our day - and the defence of marriage.

I see the errors and confusion in the worldwide church as an expression of the fallenness of man. Just as the snake deceived Eve, so we have all been led astray so many times over the past 20 centuries. The Catholics persecuted Puritans, and the Protestants burned Catholics. We share in each other’s disasters, but also in the hope that Christ will lead us into his truth.

I am truly optimistic that there is revival welling up within Catholicism. The vast majority of people who have heard and believed the story of Jesus have done so within a Catholic context. As long ago as 1985, Catholic and Evangelical scholars gathered to discuss what it means to be saved: this is what they concluded...

‘Our entire hope of justification and salvation rests on Christ Jesus and on the gospel whereby the good news of God's merciful action in Christ is made known; we do not place our ultimate trust in anything other than God's promise and saving work in Christ. This excludes ultimate reliance on our faith, virtues, or merits, even though we acknowledge God working in these by grace alone (solo gratia). In brief, hope and trust for salvation are gifts of the Holy Spirit and finally rest solely on God in Christ . . . Our intent in presenting this statement is to help our churches see how and why they can and should increasingly proclaim together the one, undivided gospel of God's saving mercy in Jesus Christ.’

Remember the parable of the farmer whose field was filled with weeds, but who would not pull them up because there were good crops in there, too? I believe that within the Roman Catholic church in Ireland there are great crops (maybe lonely crops!) ready to bear fruit, and in need of our nourishment and fellowship. These people should be sitting by our side at New Horizon.
Whatever our denomination, we are trusting in the faithfulness and grace of God to lead us home.

We are saved by his gift and not by our efforts, and with our human minds we try and perceive the wonders of his being and the desire of his will. We stumble and make giant mistakes because living the human life is like trying to drive on the Autobahn with a sheet of dark glass across the windscreen. Despite the crashes and explosions which litter church history, God somehow keeps loving us, forgiving us, and calling us to love each other. In trying to do the right thing and believe the right thing we need the advice and teaching of each other. This comes from years of argument and reformation; another name for this guidance could be tradition.

It’s an unfinished project. Over the years we’ve picked up countless heresies and thankfully/hopefully dropped them again. There are ideas buzzing about evangelicalism which in a few centuries time may either be considered gospel truth or be looked back on as a bizarre wandering from the way. What will we make of the Toronto Blessing or the Left Behind theology?

In practical terms, the bible is like a zip file and tradition is the decompressing process – the Holy Spirit works through the teaching of this Word to touch and convict our hearts. It is in our traditions preaching takes place, and it is tradition which has coined the concept of the Trinity, and joined together our understandings of subjects such as heaven and hell and the atonement.
We see the truth only in part; there are huge unanswered questions with giant theological consequences. If we are honest, theologically speaking, within the Reformed tribes the free will/Calvinist divide is at least as wide as that between Rome and Canterbury, but we find each other less frightening. But God is faithful and is calling people from every tribe, nation and tradition.

I’m excited that Catholic teaching is gradually ditching the idea that original sin is washed away in baptism, and the discussion about what happens in the Eucharist seems to be concluding it is not that a priest magically transforms bread and wine. Rather, the ultimate reality is there is a real presence of Christ because believers have gathered together.

Is there a long way to go? You bet. But take a look at these words from the latest Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church...

'Christ’s death is both the Paschal sacrifice that accomplishes the definitive redemption of men, through "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world," and the sacrifice of the New Covenant, which restores man to communion with God by reconciling him to God through the "blood of the covenant, which was poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."'

Please don’t think I’m saying that tradition is equal to scripture or in anyway a substitute to it. But whether or not we like it, we are all influenced by a tradition of interpreting scripture. And it is while trying to make sense of what God is saying to us that two things can happen:

1. We can hear his voice and do his will.
2. We can get the wrong end of the stick and make mistakes.

With hindsight, I think all of us can agree that there are plenty of examples of the first thing happening. I would include here the formulation of the Apostles Creed, the compilation of the canon of scripture, and Martin Luther’s condemnation of the sale of indulgences and renewal of emphasis on justification by faith.

It’s even easier to find examples of events in the second category. Shall we put in here the Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition’s use of torture and South African churches’ defence of apartheid?

The examples of the heroes of the faith demonstrates it is perfectly possible to live a life in which one does right things and wrong things simultaneously. Martin Luther embraced the message of Romans, but he still believed in the elements of transubstantiation, and when he got involved in politics advocated some pretty awful policies against peasants and Jews. In the same way that David sinned with Bathsheeba, and Solomon and Gideon both ended their days in questionable circumstances, none of us are immune from slipping into error.

But beyond all this is God’s plan for history and the amazing revelation of salvation through his son Jesus Christ. I have quite big doubts about the charismatic movement’s wilder moments, and most Protestants will never be able to accept the immaculate conception of Mary, but in a secular world I treasure the fellowship of men and women who acknowledge that the most important thing that has ever happened is the death and resurrection of our king and saviour.
To finish the quote from the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church:

‘This sacrifice of Christ is unique; it completes and surpasses all other sacrifices. First, it is a gift from God the Father himself, for the Father handed his Son over to sinners in order to reconcile us with himself. At the same time it is the offering of the Son of God made man, who in freedom and love offered his life to his Father through the Holy Spirit in reparation for our disobedience.
‘Jesus substitutes his obedience for our disobedience "For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience many will be made righteous." By his obedience unto death, Jesus accomplished the substitution of the suffering Servant, who "makes himself an offering for sin", when "he bore the sin of many", and who "shall make many to be accounted righteous", for "he shall bear their iniquities". Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father.’

Catholicism
Ireland
Christianity